June, 2016 meet-up of Belarus Azure User Group

Last week on June'21 we've had another meet-up event of our local Azure User Group where people interested in learning how Azure can help them build great solutions of tomorrow share their experience and adventures. This time around we talked about Azure Active Directory and efficient file storage.

I labeled my talk "Azure AD for developers" as I was trying to demonstrate how relatively easy it is for developers to take advantage of Azure AD when implementing security requirements that are common in today's applications. I used my playground app BookFast that I've already mentioned in various posts. We've had a look at federated sign-in both for corporate users through v1 endpoints, then we had a glance at customer sign-in using v2 endpoints of Azure B2C and we also learned how we can delegate access to remote services. By building on top of the robust, secure and scalable identity infrastructure developers have more time to focus on delivering astonishing user experience and features in their applications and at the same time have a good sleep knowing that hundreds of security experts at Microsoft are taking care of their identity story. This is what 'standing on the shoulders of giants', as Scott Hanselman often puts it, really is and this is what keeps me thrilled as I look forward.

Dzmitry Durasau shared some unique experience of his and his team building a reliable and efficient file storage solutions on Azure. He reviewed several options such as File Storage, StorSimple and home-grown IAAS-based solutions. All have their usage scenarios and little pitfalls that you only get to know once you have spent some time with them and picked up some bruises. What I personally took away from Dzmitry's talk is that technology and architecture that seem to work well on premises may fall short in the public cloud and it once again confirmed that migration to the cloud isn't just moving old stuff from your basement to a VM. Mindset change, re-design, dropping old patterns and ways of doing things are essential parts of a successful migration. And Azure allows you to build efficient hybrid solutions and keep things where they work best. But I seem to have sailed away from the Dzmitry's talk a bit, lol!

Overall, it was a fantastic event and I'm looking forward to meeting with our community again!